At Quadrant, Dalrymple traces what he sees as the long decline of the BBC: from a trusted global authority to an institution widely met with skepticism, a collapse of prestige driven in large part by dumbing itself down to what it perceives as the level of its audience.

Not very deeply concealed in the story is the implicit view of the BBC that most of the population was crude, and that crudity was therefore necessary to capture its attention. It also had played a part, again dialectical, in the reduction of the attention span of the population, rather condescendingly assuming that it could no longer attend to serious discussions about serious subjects, without sensational visual effects, that lasted more than a minute or two.